Consumer transaction facilities, e.g. automated teller machines, have been used in, e.g. financial institutions to carry out transactions with customers, e.g. transactions of depositing cash, namely bills and coins, or withdrawing cash by a customer.
Japanese patent laid-open publication No. 2011-2921 offers an automated teller machine, which includes a bill slot for giving and receiving bills to and from a customer, a validator for determining the denominations and authenticity of bills deposited in the machine, a temporary holding section for temporarily holding deposited bills, and denomination-sorted cassettes for stocking bills sorted by denominations. In the automated teller machine, when the customer inserts bills into the bill slot of the automated teller machine, the validator distinguishes the deposited bills, and the temporary holding section temporarily stores the bills when the bills are determined as authentic ones, whereas bills considered as being inappropriate are returned to the bill slot to give them back to the customer. Subsequently in the automated teller machine, the customer fixes the amount of money to be deposited, and the validator in turn determines again the denominations of the bills stored in the temporary holding section to store the bills in the denomination-sorted cassettes according to the denominations thus determined.
In a conventional automated teller machine, a temporary holding section is configured such that an upper tape is drawn from an upper reel and is turned back by an upper tape pulley, and a lower tape is drawn from a lower reel and turned back by a certain pulley. The upper and lower tapes thus turned back hold conveyed bills in between with the shorter-side direction thereof aligned to sequentially wrap the bills on a cylindrical drum, whereby a number of bills are stored in the housing of the temporary holding section.
Correspondingly, the upper and lower tapes are respectively wrapped on the upper and lower reels, and the drum is rotated in a direction opposite to the direction for storing bills to thereby discharge the stored bills.
With the above configuration, there is a possibility that a damaged bill is torn off and a chip of the bill (hereafter called as stub) gets into an unintended place in the housing of the temporary holding section, or that a lot of bills is wrapped around the drum, which becomes increasing its diameter, and as a consequence the drum comes into contact with a movable guide so as to be disabled to rotate to discharge bills.
In such a case, a maintenance work by a serviceperson may have to be implemented in such a way that he or she removes the bill or stub from the housing of the temporary holding section by checking with his/her eyes or by approaching the inside of the housing (hereinafter referred to as access) with his/her fingers or any tools. Such a maintenance work is troublesome because the movable guide cannot widely be opened up due to the structure in which the upper tape runs over the movable guide. In order to facilitate the maintenance work, a side part of the temporary holding section would be designed to be openable, but in that case, another problem might arise that, when the bill sandwiched between the upper and lower tapes is drawn out, the tapes may be drawn out together with the bill or the tapes may be torn off.
In this way, the temporary holding section has a drawback in maintenance workability due to the presence of the movable guide and the upper tape.